Steak Dinner

Sorry about the blog hiatus. During the summer, without teaching
classes, inspiration is harder to come by. But, tonight I cooked a
steak. I recently got a new digital meat thermometer. My plan was to
slowly cook the steak until the internal temperature got to be about 140
degrees Fahrenheit with the oven at 200 degrees, take it out, wrap in
tin foil, crank the oven to 500 degrees, stick it back in, and give it a
nice exterior, reaching an internal temperature of about 150 degrees
which would put it at about medium. After I put the steak into the oven
though, I started to watch the temperature go up on my digital
thermometer and thought, why not take data. And so I did. Here are the results.

Above you see the internal temperature of the steak as a function of
time. First some comments about the graph.

The steak started at 37 degrees, the temperature of my refrigerator.

I didn’t start taking data until about 20 minutes in.

The red dashed lines mark where I turned up the temperature of the
oven. It started at 200 degrees, then 250, then 300, and in the
final stretch, 500 with the broiler.

The green dotted lines mark where I got impatient and opened the
door to the over to check on the food.

The yellow background denotes where the steak was outside of the
oven resting in tinfoil.

Now some comments on the data

You can clearly see a change in the data when I changed the oven temperature.

Opening the oven door really seems to slow down the cooking process

The temperature of the center of the steak continues to rise after
you take it out of the oven.

In fact, curiously enough, the temperature of the center of the
steak seems to have risen the quickest after it was taken out of the oven.

Next I decided to look at the heating rate, computed by taking the
finite differences of my data points and propagating the errors.

As you’ll see, I really didn’t have enough data points or a precise
enough thermometer to really see the changes in the heating rate.
Finally some comments about the food.

The steak was good. You’ll notice I shot past 150, ended up with a
temperature of about 160, and a steak that was nearly medium well.

Cooking the steak slowly like this yielded as pretty soft texture,
akin to a roast. Heck, I essentially roasted the steak.

The steak was served with asparagus and baked potatoes. As an
interesting aside, the baked potatoes were in the oven along with
the steak the whole time, but did not cook all the way through. I
normally bake potatoes at 350 for about an hour, and here they were
in a hot oven for over an hour and a half, half an hour of which was
above 300, but they didn’t cook through.

I clearly have too much time on my hands. I have one more steak, and I
think I’ll try a different cooking method. Maybe I’ll have the patience
to take data again, we’ll see.